


Three Perfect Skies in the Life and Career of Lewis Nixon, and One in the Memories of Richard Winters

by raedbard



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-07
Updated: 2007-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 00:21:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We look like boy soldiers, is what Dick Winters says." Dick and Nix, through the days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Perfect Skies in the Life and Career of Lewis Nixon, and One in the Memories of Richard Winters

1\. three miles up - top of the world

_We look like boy soldiers_, is what Dick Winters says.

The photograph is a little over-exposed. It looks all sky, with perhaps the suggestion of huts in the near background, seeming to hover in the air, fuzzy and pre-fabricated. He and Dick stand against the pyramid of Currahee, which rises smoke-like in the far background, like a fading monument. It already seems like something out of a legend in which he had no part. The burn of muscle and the taste of sweat and its sting in his eyes are not even a memory, but like a story he heard once. His own legs never felt a pain like that.

Nixon smiles.

"Couple of sharp fellas." He chuckles. "That's right."

His forefinger brushes the side of Dick's shoulder, in the photograph. Nixon feels the nudge of bone under his finger for a second, the coarse wool of the jacket. Just for a second. When he looks up he finds Lt. Richard Winters, spick and span and as clean as a fresh bar of soap, looking at him, eyes flickering.

Dick's eyes are like the weather in England - changeable, full of weather that is nothing but a memory an hour later. The colour shifts with the light. Yet the sheen of absolute rectitude too is always there; whatever the Pennsylvanian equivalent of a stiff upper lip is, Dick has it. His small mouth, like a bunched fist or a recalcitrant flower bloom, always half ready to withdraw the smile, draws Nixon's eye. It seems to have no colour at all in this dim morning, just as it has virtually no colour in the photograph which is still grasped between his own thumb and forefinger. His own lips, in the picture, seem almost coloured in with ink, dark and pursed and unsure, as if baby-faced Lewis Nixon hates having his photograph taken and is hoping that his squint and unnatural colouring will save him from his fate.

A funny pair, Nixon thinks.

"Don't you think we look young?" Dick says, with hardly any inflection.

Nixon squints at the photograph again. Then lets out a short puff of air which might qualify as a laugh.

"I do. You look like you were born in uniform."

"It's been a long time, Lew."

"Sure has."

"How old are you again?" Dick says, allowing for a slight twitch in the composure of his pale mouth.

"I don't look _that_ young, thank you, _Dick_."

"No, you don't," Dick says, slowly. "Not anymore."

There are no mountains in England. Or at least there are none in Uppottery, though there are winding country roads that could defeat the most skilled of navigators and enough rain to give a man trenchfoot. But Nixon knows his blessings. There is also hot water and enough food, though it is perhaps the most uninspiring of his whole army career to date. There is whiskey and places to go to when the whiskey runs out. And there're no goddamn mountains. And for that, Lewis Nixon is profoundly grateful.

*

Nixon is twenty-four and probably looks younger. He knows it too. If it wasn't the kind of thing Sobel would double-time him up Currahee for in about a half a second, Nixon would leave his stubble the way it looks in the morning; sharpening the corners of his soft-looking face nicely and rubbing dirt in the flamboyant reputation of the Yalie lieutenant he seems to have become without quite noticing it. But such statements of personality, even if they are really attempts at the eradication of a personality, are not permitted. Nixon shaves dutifully every morning, and some nights too, and is depressed by the Army soap and its inability to weather his face in the slightest.

He runs the mountain and does the jumps and keeps a clean rifle and a clean locker under his bed. He wishes he could impress on Malarkey and Hoobler that pornography is just as good, if not better, when it stays on the inside of your head, but they won't listen. He takes care of his men and has one of the sharpest salutes in the Company. He knows a few jokes that even impress George Luz and he thinks he made Webster choke that time he told the story about the two Yale Literature professors, the cafeteria Jell-O and the duck. He keeps his thoughts to himself, mostly, and waits for the time when those thoughts can be useful. Part of him even enjoys Sobel; it's nice to have someone to despise.

His average time up Curahee is somewhere in the middle third of all the men in Easy, which is good enough. His _record_ time beats all but four men in the company - Perconte, who is small enough, God knows, to slip underneath everyone else's feet on the way up the damn hill; Guarnere and Webster, who both have an effortless, athletic ease when running, even when running up unconscionably large hills, though Nixon gathers their skills were honed in very different circumstances; and Dick Winters, whom he has never beaten at anything.

But his stars, or so it was made clear to him in Officer Candidate's School, would not be those won for combat; not the same stars, then, as Dick Winters. Captain Harris, the great ogre of the OCS (though Nix thought the old man really kinda liked him), had pointed his finger straight at the tender part of Lewis Nixon's tender chest and pronounced his destiny. He would be, and wait for the drum-roll now fellas, an intelligence officer. Captain Harris, or so he said, was never wrong about these things. He has, or rather had - Nixon got word that Harris had died in a freak accident some months ago at the OCS - a perfect, one _hundred_ per cent record on these things. _I am never wrong, boy_. Nix had just blushed and tried to hide it, and then blushed some more. New York wit seemed to have deserted him that day. He looked to his right and saw Dick Winters (lately pronounced by the great man as a commander in the making) re-arranging his ugly face to hide the smile.

He waited until they were dismissed, then punched Dick in the arm.

"Or should I just salute you?"

"Who am I to argue with the oracle, Nix?"

"Well clearly a greater man than I, Dick. A much greater man than I."

"Not greater," Dick said, only smiling at the very corners of his strange, pursed mouth, "Just different."

Dick Winters, his best friend. Maybe the best friend he's ever had. Maybe, he thinks sometimes with his eyes open in the middle of the night, trying to not stare at the guy in the bunk next to his own, the best friend he'll ever have. It would be difficult to find two guys more different and yet, whether it is Nixon's dark romanticism or Dick's dazzlingly straight magnetism, there is a secret thread binding them together, and Nixon thanks the fate that assigned them to the same company, on the very first day.

Nixon had started it. The guy looked almost shy when he first saw him - one of those men who is a little too tall and stands conscious of it; the red hair picked him out of a line-up nicely and made sure he stayed picked out; his small, intense eyes which never seemed to stay the same colour longer than a few hours looked around at everything, inspecting, cataloguing. Nixon frowned at the sight, then smiled.

"How ya doing?"

The handshake was warm, firm. Just exactly as it ought to be.

"Lewis Nixon, New York. I guess that'll have to do until we get serial numbers, huh?"

He smiled. A polite, gathered kind of smile. "Richard Winters, Pennsylvania."

"Nice to meet you, Richard Winters of Pennsylvania."

"Dick," he said, smile broadening by about two degrees of latitude. Nixon had smiled too; this is native charm, boys and girls.

"Lew."

Dick had nodded and if Nixon had carried liquor on his person at all times then, as he does now, he would have offered Dick the canteen. And Dick would have refused and Nixon would have shrugged and thought nothing further of it and they would have carried on walking to wherever it was they were going. As it was, those revelations were saved for a little later in the day, but Nixon received them, eventually, on the road. Differences kept opening out between them - turned out that Dick's family were one of those nice lower middle-class ones which Nixon always used to think it would be fun to run away to, as if to the circus, and Dick blew the air out between his teeth when Nixon told him how much, on average, give-or-take, his own daddy made in a year. Pennsylvania, or so Dick tells it, is a pretty little place but Nixon offers to give Dick a guided tour of various parts of Europe, should they end up trying to invade it. Dick hears that Yale is nice, though he really couldn't say, and Nixon confirms for him that, yes indeed, it is.

So okay, they're very different - in background, in temperament, Dick is even fair where Lewis is dark, and while one of them will be, or so sayeth the oracle, a combat giant, the other is destined for brilliance with map and compass. But Nixon stops seeing those things within a few days of knowing Dick. They just don't seem to matter. And part of him knows that this is the promise of war breaking down the barriers of class and personality between them, and part of him knows that there is a further promise within that one - they're going to be officers and they're going to need to understand each other almost by telepathy if this job is going to get done the way it should be done, and there will be absolutely no room to fuck up, so better get to know the other guy now.

But another buried part of him is sure of something else. Something that doesn't seem as important as the other things but only seems so because Nixon is almost afraid to uncover its secret. That secret being that he knows he will never have another man like Dick Winters in his life, and he is going to hold on, tight.

*

"Hey, Dick!" He hisses it, into Dick's ear, into the silence of the barracks. "C'mon, wake up."

"Nix?"

"Yeah, it's me. Are you coming?"

"Are we going somewhere?"

"I want another try at that goddamn mountain."

"Nix, this is a really good time to practise what you're best at."

"What might that be?"

"Sleeping. More sleeping. It's three in the morning, Nix."

"Oh, Dick, you're already so good-tempered -- "

"I could try not to be, if it would help."

"Come on - we're not all Jesse Owens, you know?"

"Your record's fine."

"No, it's not."

"Okay, fine, maybe it's not. Do we have to break it now? Does it have to be both of us?"

"C'mon, Dick. Don't tell me you don't want to be up in the top."

"I do. But in daylight."

"Luz and Malarkey went up last night. Guarnere, Lipton, Toye and Randleman the night before."

"And you don't see why they should have all the fun?"

"I want to beat that goddamn mountain."

Dick sighs. "I miss your sleep-all-day phase."

"I'm not over it. This is a temporary love affair."

"Short-lived madness?"

"If you want to call it that. Are you coming?"

"Give me a second to find my P.T. gear."

"I'll be outside."

Dick isn't rubbing his eyes when he emerges, without a sound, from their barracks. The other guys sleep almost as heavily as Nixon does, particularly after a day of weapons training and assault courses like today; Dick is the only light sleeper among them and so, Nixon supposes, it figures that he doesn't even seem to be tired.

"You owe me," Dick says, softly.

"Maybe I'll save your life someday?"

"That would cover it, thank you."

He punches Dick on the arm, gently, a brush of knuckles to bicep, a touch of pale skin to freckled. Nixon wonders if its the cool air that makes him shiver.

"Let's go."

They jog up and out of the camp and even now, at some few minutes past three in the morning, Nixon thinks he can see dawn coming. He thinks it's gonna be a fine day. Dick picks up the pace some, just as he would if he was running his men up the mountainside, little by little, gentle but firm. Words pouring out of him like air, like sweat; small encouragements he cannot help but give though Nixon has no need of them, because that's just the kind of man Dick is. Nix looks down at his tired feet, his aching legs, and smiles.

"What company is this?"

"_Easy Company._"

They both whisper it into the gravel surface, into the mud tracks left by their boots that morning. Nixon observes the same treads over and over, repeated in patterns that, in this no-light of pre-dawn would surely mean something, if only he was a little more awake, if there was a little more light. It is six miles formed by habit and training, something which seems to be fundamentally important to the future righting of the world: that they should run this hill in under fifty minutes and draw straws for the honour of gutting Sobel with his own bayonet exactly one hour after getting the go order and fix it so that it should be Guarnere or Popeye Wynn or Gordon, because those three would appreciate it just that tiny fraction more than the rest, and Dick wants his men to be happy.

"Goddamnit, I hate this fucking hill!"

Nixon yells into the coming dawn and into the trees lining the mountain whose name he will not say tonight, whose invocation he will not make, not until he looks at his watch and knows that he's made it; until he's at peace, if just for one night, knowing that he is one of the best.

He hardly feels tired when he makes the peak, slapping his hand against the marker stone in one smooth movement. Dick is behind him, still whispering encouragement. Nixon smiles and catches his arm.

"Dick - stop. Let's sit."

"Don't you wanna -- "

"No, it's okay."

"Not tired, are you?"

"Nope."

"Okay."

"I just want to take in the view."

Dick smiles, almost laughs. "Okay, then."

The stone is hardly big enough for the both of them, so they sit with their thighs pressed close together and Dick's arm sharp in Nixon's side. Their breath heaves in the silence, as though Currahee is moaning. Dick smells exactly like every other sweaty man Nixon has encountered in his time in the Army, and yet does not. There is something fresh and sharp about his scent, something like earth and the memory of rain on a fine day; something which Nixon will never be able to describe completely to his satisfaction, even if he knows this man another forty years. It's easy enough to lean against him - can't be helped really. His skin is warm and smooth, the hair on his arms and thighs seldom coarse, never abundant, all pale golden in a good light, an ordinary blond-brown with just the suggestion of red in this poor one. Nixon realises well enough what he is doing - this is the kind of thing they write poetry about, right? In fact, isn't this poetry?

So what if it is? Lewis Nixon isn't going to be reciting it. He can't yet - it's still writing itself inside his body. Like the training, it is not yet done, not yet perfected. He gets the feeling he'll have a little more time to get this one right.

"I never realised it was beautiful up here."

"Yeah," Dick says, in his soft-wonder voice. "It is."

*

2\. the secrets of foxholes

Shit happens in foxholes. This is well-known and, as some find out firsthand, even literally true on occasion, but Nixon thinks he couldn't have imagined this particular brand of shit would seem so natural, so acceptable. But what is acceptable, here under the loose, shifting canopy of the snow-strewn trees in a forest in the Ardennes? Nothing that Nixon has noticed so far.

Eating what is surely powdered squirrel and drinking brown grit made up to look like coffee? No.

Sleeping through a cold so thick that, when you wake, you need a few minutes to remember that you even _have_ a body, with limbs and torso and head? No.

Shaving with melted ice and soap so cold you need to hold it between your thighs for ten minutes before the fucking stuff will lather? No.

Nixon gave up on shaving a couple days ago. He likes the beard well enough, but likes better the illusion that it keeps his face warmer, if by only a degree. It does not, he knows. He started rubbing the tip of his tongue over the ridges and chapping on his lower lip, unconsciously but obsessively. He only stopped when he realised that he was imitating Dick, whose only visible sign of discomfort beyond the slight, almost invisible way he bounces on the heels of his boots when the wind blows through the trees, is his habit of holding his lower lip between his teeth. He doesn't bite the skin, or run his tongue into the imperfections as Nixon does; Dick is too straight for that. It would be unsoldierly. Nixon half enjoys the sharp, definite pain which comes when he pulls too hard with his teeth (it is a contrast to the dull, permeating pain which is ubiquitous in the forest) but really derives his satisfaction from smoothing over the roughness, the imperfection. Dick, it seems, can put up with a little imperfection.

Thank god for Vat 69. Warming, nourishing, anaesthetising. Though less than he'd hoped; more than he had feared. He daren't take more than a few swigs in a day, or a night. He daren't lose his coherency completely, daren't be a drunk in the snow, though he knows the alcohol would lull him to sleep better than a fire or some decent chow. He doesn't get drunk on manoeuvres and Bastogne is one long, frozen hell of a manoeuvre. One absolute after another, coated in a nice dusting of snow. It's no place to be a drunk. But neither is it a place to relinquish their crutches, as much of a support as crutches, as vital to the management of unbearable pain as morphine, like Vat 69.

But that's the meaning of Bastogne; Lewis Nixon's personalised, very special meaning: somewhere beyond the reach of a mouthful of warm, golden whiskey. Where such comfort is stowed away in a box whose key he has swallowed.

He will just have to go without comfort, or look for it elsewhere, in the same place as every other man in Easy - in the terrible, powerful intimacy which comes upon two men when they share a hole in the ground in the middle of a forest in the middle of a snowstorm.

Nixon thinks: guess I'm lucky in my hole partner.

Although enough days he hates Dick Winters as much as he loves him.

Dick wakes while the sky is still half-full of darkness, throwing off the canopy of their foxhole and allowing great gusts of freezing cold air to penetrate the albeit only slightly less freezing air of the hole. Nixon pulls the blanket closer round his head and curses under his breath and knows that Dick hears him and is smiling that small, amused smile. Just like your father did having caught you wading knee deep in mud at the bottom of the garden when you were six years old. He doesn't say anything and he doesn't seem to begrudge Nixon his sleep (or has accepted - finally - that it takes a mortar shelling at the very least to wake Nixon from this sleep of the dead) nor does he aim a gentle kick into his arm as he leaves the foxhole. But Nixon feels the weight of his friend's rectitude and knows it for a weight he is less able, if not completely incapable, of bearing.

Which is usually when he remembers that he loves Dick, with an intensity he hadn't fully realised he was capable of until Easy, until mountains and mortars and what might as well be miles of snow and forest, for all the progress they are making, entered his life.

It's odd, frankly, but absolute - the way Dick Winters opens Lewis Nixon's heart like a secret door which he closes behind himself, quietly and neatly, locking it with a twist of his wrist. All the men have their particular friends, the small entities of three or four guys who function as a single unit, sharing sleep and food and getting each other's blood on their hands. Nixon observes the phenomenon with a distance of an officer, but also as a man who never before considered himself subject to such profound shifts of the heart, as a man more than capable of intellectualising the closeness between men which war will always engender but not as one who thought he would, or could, experience it. He was a little shocked when he realised it had happened to him and Dick.

Like any other kind of love, it slaps Nix in the chest will a full clip's worth of shock and lays him open on the snow, bleeding out.

It's the best metaphor he can come up with in the foxhole. He can't think of any words which are not to do with bullets and explosions, not here, where such things are as regular as the rise and the fall of the sun. He figures it's true enough. Maybe he'll ask Webster what he thinks to it, sometime. Maybe something better will occur to him, once the snow stops.

*

Nightfall. Not dark, because it is never quite dark here, for all that the trees blank out the sky just as well as a tarp, or the depth of a foxhole. The snow steals the darkness just as it steal the heat. Nixon always liked the snow before - snowball fights and snowmen and snowcones in summer. He doesn't like it so much anymore.

He persuaded Dick, who seemed absolutely desperate to get hypothermia by staying above ground in the CP to sleep, into his foxhole. They are meant to share it more often than they actually do. Nixon sometimes finds he cannot get to sleep for hours and walks the line until he realises he's in danger of collapsing; Dick often finds he cannot sleep without first checking on the men, and the line, and the maps. Anyone would think, Nixon ponders, that they don't want to be alone in the same ditch together.

Well, they are tonight. The temperature has dropped another few degrees. The wind has blown up from the north. The Germans are suspiciously quiet. Neither of them can sleep.

They'd play cards (though not for money, _of course_, Nixon reminds himself) but they can't see. Nixon would drink, only he doesn't dare. So they talk.

Their whispering fills the air like snowflakes. Mostly they talk shop, discussing men injured and men suffering if never men dead. The dead are beyond their words, and it never seems quite right to mention them. They talk about the ones who will soon need invaliding out - the trenchfoot, the pneumonia. Nixon does calculations on his numb fingers, trying to work out their strength, trying to work out just how thin the line can get, before it snaps. He tries to make his brain do its proper work; tries to think and think and think - some way out of this, some way to make sense out of the disorder. It's harder in the snow. It's harder, ironically, without the whiskey. It's so much harder than it is at HQ.

So they move on. Because Nixon is trying to think of anything but the pressure of Dick Winters' thigh against his own, he moves the conversation onto women.

Now, he's no queer, Mrs. Nixon's boy isn't, and he likes the warm pleasures of a good woman as much as any other guy in the company. And for twenty minutes he tries his best to convince Dick of that fact. Though, as far as he knows, was never in doubt for him. Dick, who is as clean-cut a guy as Nixon has ever met in his life, has a certain tendency to take a couple of girls casually taken up with and tenderly, if not quite sorrowfully, parted from, as evidence of a wider capacity for whoring. Of which, naturally, he doesn't approve. He's pursed his lips before at Nixon's tales of the one or two pretty English girls he found in Aldbourne and of whom he has very fond memories. Or so he tells Dick. In truth, he doesn't remember it very well.

"She had ... her _hair_. Really pretty. Dark."

"Yeah."

"At least, I think it was. Dark, I mean."

"You're positive about the pretty?"

"Would I get that part wrong?"

Dick blows out a short shot of air. "No. Probably not."

Silence descends again. Nixon has run out of stories; Winters has none to tell. And yet it is easier, or seems so, to be warm when they are talking to each other. And, in the absence of any other way to dull his senses, it takes the edge off the other thing; off the warmth and solidity of the body next to his own. Which is why what he says next, he thinks afterwards, must have been his brain petitioning for a return to Vat 69.

"Is this seemly, d'you think? For officers such as ourselves?"

"What?" Dick says, his teeth chattering, the word coming out a little staccato, like rapid gunfire. "Huddling together for warmth in the Ardennes in winter?"

"Yeah. This little pleasure jaunt."

"How much pleasure are you looking for, Nix?"

His shoulder is jammed hard against the meat of Nixon's chest and his hands are held together, looped and a little shaky, moving back and forth from his knees to his mouth in the search for warmth. The canopy is loose at the edges, maybe four inches of gap between the maw of the pit and the start of the tarpaulin. It is enough to let in the moonlight, the refracted light which fairly beams off the surface of the snow which has been falling all night, fresh and clean, awaiting its mud and blood stains. It is enough light to see the glint of Dick's eyes, beside him in the night; not enough light to see their colour, or their expression.

Nixon doesn't need to. His voice is velvet-smooth, ordered, ready. It suggests a joke, but only the barest hint of one; something richer in his tone, something acid-sharp in the 's' of 'pleasure'. Nixon lets out a long breath. He is smiling, unable to stop, unable to feel all the muscles in his face moving.

"Just the regular amount."

"How's the hipflask?"

"Fine and dandy, thank you. It's full."

Dick exhales. It might be a laugh. "That's good. Unusual."

"The Bastogne special blend is just too rich for me."

"Huh?"

"The coffee."

Dick does laugh at that - a sound that cuts the air like thunder, sharp and warm, producing a taste in the back of Nixon's throat like the smell of a gunpowder burn.

Nixon shifts further down in the foxhole, letting mud and ruin soak into his hair, ice-cold trickling down his neck. Any small degree of warmth he has attain by sitting perfectly still and allowing what's left of the heat of his body warm the earth is lost. He is freezing again, or rather, he has noticed that he is freezing again.

"Fuck," he says, to no-one in particular.

Dick stays silent. His breath crowds the air. Nixon can feel it, a half-degree warmer than the rest, but dissipating so quickly, so transient. He wishes he could see its silver in the night.

"I don't like drinking here," he says.

"No?"

"No." He smiles, to himself. "You can't escape the snow, it seems. You just get swallowed up."

Dick nods, or Nixon thinks he does. He's used to Nixon's cryptic phraseology now; a nod is all he usually gets out of Dick by way of response. Nixon doesn't move as Dick shifts his body further down, their shoulders level now and Dick's longer legs bent slightly at the knee. Their thighs are still pressed together. Dick has his arms folded across his chest with his fingers curled around his biceps. The knuckles are hard in Nixon's own arm. He draws his knees up close to his chest and rests his arms on them, blows onto his hands, rubs them together, sighs.

"You ever think you'd miss British food?"

"I never thought you would."

"Hah! Yeah. Well, I think I do. This may be the end, Dick."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"Optimist."

"Pessimist."

"May we ever remain so," Nixon whispers, into the night.

He doesn't understand what happens next, except that he knows that shit happens in foxholes. And this time he was here to see it, personally, on the business end of the consequences of unusual closeness and prolonged peril. No-one warned him that it would be such a warm, tempting kind of crazy; that Dick Winters' cold-chapped, rose-bloom mouth was soft and tender, or that Dick's palm on his cheek would give him back the kind of peace he hadn't felt since before Toccoa. Dick's hand slips up into his dirty, ragged hair and strokes it, like a blessing.

Nixon can't decide if he wants to laugh or cry or fall asleep, against Dick Winters' shoulder.

They're both educated men, both officers. They both know the rules. They both have plans that do not - that cannot - involve the other one. And yet Nixon remembers this small series of moments, in a ditch the same size as a grave, in the Ardennes forest, in the coldest cold he has ever or will ever know, as the time he found that the thread of his life, inconsequential thing, had a knot in it. A knot he can never untie. He cannot stop his love for Dick Winters swallowing him up as he can the snow, as he might the booze, if he cared to. He has no wish to close his eyes on this waking dream.

_Do you love me?_

Please say that you do.

He goes out that night. He slips from the foxhole at 3 a.m. and walks along the line. His eyes are full of the blackness of the hole and his lips are still tingling. It is still snowing.

Lewis Nixon raises his sleepless head into the sky, face-up, and lets the snow fall over his mouth, over his eyes. The night air is clear. For once it does not stink of burning and although the tangy, coppery smell of the snow is reminiscent of the stink of blood, tonight it seems rather pleasant, not like Bastogne at all. Nixon opens his mouth and lets the snow fall into it. It tastes like the smell of Dick's neck and the colour of his hair.

He closes his eyes, lowers his head. He chuckles silently, laughs at himself.

When he opens his eyes all he sees, and this is how he knows it is love, is a perfect Belgian sky.

*

3\. gates to the world

There are four guys playing music in the street.

He's just heard news that will end the war: Hitler is dead and soon it will, it must, all be over. And is he happy? Is he hell.

Beethoven drifts into the dusty sky, in a world made of things without shape, fashioned now so new in their dispossession - stubs that once were tall trees and houses now just piles of bricks taken one by one to another pile of bricks. Where nothing looks the same as it did, having become another entry in the parade of bombed-out crap they pass through - the eternal cities on the endless highway. Fucked-Up-Shit Strasse One, Two, Three.

Nixon shakes his head, as though to clear the sight from it. Then removes a pack of smokes from his top pocket, thumbs one out and follows it with his lighter. He fumbles the flicking of the lighter's ignition and then realises, as he almost drops the thing, that his hands are shaking. His fingers cannot keep purchase. His lips are having trouble holding on to the cigarette.

Nixon swipes a hand over his face and back through his hair. It'd be nice if someone, just right at this moment, came up to him and said words to this effect: just what the _fuck_ is wrong with you?

That's all. Nothing more complicated than an enquiry about the nature of his screwiness, his petty, ridiculous inability to function, his brain's spiralling from fun and cleverness down into misery, a self-loathing he barely even notices anymore; like a jumpman careening into the sky separated from his parachute, aimed for a tree he can't even pick out of its line yet.

He looks back down into the street, letting his eyes be drawn where his brain would rather they did not go. He sighs. Then he lets his gaze drift up into the sky. It seems marked, burnt, cold and starved. Nixon squints at it, thinking that it looks ... strange. Unreal. But that is true of all skies he has seen above ruined cities. Perhaps it is because his own eyes are so angry that this sky seems different, more profane than all the rest.

That's probably it.

Because, hey. This war's really all about Lewis Nixon. Ain't that right?

*

They died. Most of them. And he supposes most of them had been dying for a long time, but it still seems wrong. They were free, once the gates were open, free to live. But most of them didn't have that choice. Most of them died.

It is not this which makes him hit the bottle that much harder in Germany than in any other place they've yet been in. The camp is an excuse, just as the letter from Cathy is an excuse, just as the whole damn war is an excuse for him to be exactly what he has always been, which is nothing more or less than a contradictory man.

His mind, its brilliance (so-called) earns him promotion, respect, even a small measure (not as great as Dick's) of adulation. Women have kissed him in the street. Men have stammered out their names. There are three stars above his jump wings. He understands, better than most, the application of tactics, the proper way to confound an enemy, how to carry out surveillance well enough that you know when a guy is most likely to take his dog for a walk and the average age, and thereby the likelihood of an experienced man blowing your own guys apart, of the Krauts in any given battalion. His brain likes to walk the paths in advance, count the ditches, scout for snipers. It knows just exactly what it is doing. Sometimes, Nixon doesn't feel like it belongs to him at all. Sometimes, he thinks it is an instrument of torture.

If his brain got him his glory, the whiskey takes it away again.

Demotion doesn't come as a great surprise, if he's honest with himself. Nor does it hurt, not as much as it should. It helps that he hates Battalion, that he has come to loathe the marks of deference and stratification of men into the greater and the lesser which Battalion exemplifies. There are good men there, Toccoa men, but he doesn't always recognise them. He doesn't always care when he does.

It comes down to a single credo, or rather an anti-credo, distilled from the fine waters of war: he doesn't believe in heroes anymore.

Unless the candidate for that epithet also goes by the name of Major Richard Winters.

But Dick Winters doesn't understand. He has never understood _this_. He tolerates Nixon - his drinking, his inability to get up in the mornings, his attitude towards heroism, towards leadership and the chain of command. Nixon wonders how long the tolerance will hold out. That Dick is a good guy cuts both ways for Lewis Nixon, who is most certainly not what is commonly known as a good man, not in his own estimation.

He drinks to forget, to lessen, to smooth over the imperfections, to rub over the memories. But he also drinks because he likes drinking and that's the part which Dick will never understand. It's not a self-medication strategy, not really. It's not a strategy at all. It's only a twist in his soul. It's only something in him that feels good when he has a glass of Vat 69 in his hand and less good when he does not. It is not the great poetic flaw that everyone imagines, given enough time to mature, it could be. And the more he sees the cool, disappointed expression in Dick Winter's face and the distance growing in Dick's blue eyes, the more he is aware of his failures; the more he is convinced that heroes do not exist and that even if they did, like God, they do not love men like Lewis Nixon.

They went into the camp together, they stood together and listened to the broken German stammerings of the prisoners together.

But Nixon doesn't think they had the same thoughts. He doesn't think the world fell apart for them in quite the same way. And he could be wrong, he supposes it's possible. But he doesn't think he is.

He never felt less like a hero than he did when a man, the remnants of a man, came up to him and stroked the lapel of his jacket, staring at him as though he was something out of a dream, or just another pale actor in a dark dream never-ending. As the man walked - limped, shuffled, staggered - away Nixon could only form one thought clearly: I'm no hero. Just a guy who drinks too much. Just a guy who loved too poorly. Just a guy who jumps out of planes.

A simple credo of discreditation, of un-belief. _I refute the concept of heroism, because nothing like a hero could exist in such a world, nothing like heroism could live in my hollow heart._

I can't believe it.

Unless it's you.

*

They share a place, he and Dick. They always do, it seems, when the vagaries of assignment and supply allow it. Nixon almost wishes they hadn't this time. It is hard to be alone, but harder to be with him, the only hero in this world.

Dick watches him empty a bottle. He sits at the other end of the room and stares. And as the level of the whiskey in the bottle drops and the level in his belly rises, Nixon can't tell what is in Dick's eyes. Whether reproach or pity. Or disgust. He no longer knows if he has any chance to call himself loved.

But he can ask for nothing. He can still ask, _do you love me?_

How can you?

He feels the splinters of the gates in his hand as he reaches out for Dick. He can still smell the smoke and the burning in the incline of his head towards Dick's, overlaid with the crappy Army soap smell and the smell of Dick's hair, which seems sharp, tangy; red. It jars with the memories in Nixon's nose, desire and disgust forced together. The olfactory discord is so strong, so like a wrong chord played somewhere near his diaphragm on an untuned violin, that he pulls away.

"Hey," Dick says, softly. An exclamation, but not an accusation. Nixon can barely stand the sound.

"I'm sorry. Jeez, Dick, I'm --"

"No ... no."

Dick's hand, his warm, clean fingers stroke Nixon's cheek. Almost as though Nix is not quite there. Which Nixon doesn't think he is. There is a percentage of him, quite a large percentage, which is lost. Somewhere in a dusty sky which looks like the inside of bottle which looks like the inside of a prison.

"It's okay, Lew. It's okay."

Dick's hand makes it up into his hair. The fingers pull Nixon's head to the side a little, back and forth, like an American father with his hand in his son's hair. Nixon smiles what he knows is a shadowy, ambiguous, wiseguy smile. But Dick returns it with a little shrug of his mouth. A small change in the muscles of his face which mostly means: _I know_ and _me too_.

_Not you too, though, my friend._ Nixon thinks. _Your version of this sky still has the possibility of light in it._

"I didn't wanna ... I thought ... " He struggles for the sentence. It gets away. "Ah, fuck."

"There's nothing to say, Lew," Dick Winters says. Sometimes his eyes have so much colour in them, Nixon thinks. A whole fresh sky in there. Blue like a perfect glass of water, which is something Nixon has never imagined himself wanting. And this makes him smile. And then Dick smiles too, in his way.

"No. I guess not."

Their lips touch while both pairs still wear smiles. As the feeling and the expression of _it's alright_ melt back into the scratchy play-out of memory, complete with stubble and the taste of soot on his tongue, Nix remembers. Not anything in particular, not a face or a name or a number, not a smell or the touch of a hand which no longer looks human, or the sound like wailing violins of voices raised in the kind of pain which cannot be bent around words. None of those things; they come in the onslaught, following up, a covering charge of horror. It is only a twist in his belly. A feeling. A moment which changes on a dime: okay to not okay.

But this time he reaches. He opens his mouth and lets Dick inside. He puts both his hands up into Dick's sharp-smelling red hair and presses his body up against the other guy's and holds on tight.

It is in Nixon's way to hold on to analgesics. They don't help. But they are still the stuff of desire.

Dick is not much for abandoning himself to pleasure. Nixon has told him before that he makes a very poor hedonist. He holds himself right and straight and true, like the proverbial arrow. Now his shoulders are rifle-straight, which is to say that they make the perfect line, though slightly off-kilter, slung slantwise - up from the right, down at the left - because he is kneeling between Nixon's legs and steadying himself on the bed with his left hand. His eyes are clear. His pale eyelashes make a fuzzy halo around the blue, giving the impression of tears which are not there.

Nixon is glad. He almost even says so.

"I feel like I should salute you," he says instead. "I feel like fucking saluting you."

Dick looks at him, his face a picture of absolutely nothing; an over-exposed negative, full up with light. Nix chuckles. Then laughs. Then has to stop laughing, because the sound is catching in his throat and tumbling over and over, into a blank, scorched sky.

"Fuck, Dick. Jesus _fucking_ Christ."

He flinches from the profanity. Nixon can see it here, up close, his mouth only a finger's width from Dick's. But his voice is soft as he says, "I know, Nix. I know."

His hands are warm and his chest is hard, full with muscle. Like a straight line on a map. Like the sureness of the cord-pull on his chute. Like the faith he places in his own powers of reckoning, on a sober morning, with an enamel mug of crappy US Army coffee in his fist. This faith his gives to Dick, for a few moments, pressed against his body.

And the moments of his orgasm are like a wipe-clean of his senses. Forgetting. A clean plan of attack not yet covered with blood. Something true.

*

There are gates. And they mark boundaries. The provinces of left and right, public and private, beginnings, endings. And there are these gates, both opened and closed yesterday in front of their eyes and by their own hands, and these gates are an opening of the world, or so it seems to Lewis Nixon. There was the world of the gates closed, not secret, just unknown, waiting to be discovered like a huge black shadow at the edges of a map they thought they had learned by heart; that they thought everyone had by heart. Humanity's map, Nix thinks, was a little off. Undrawn, it must be re-plotted. The gates are open now.

He stands with them a while, and listens to the quartet play the Beethoven. They move on to Mozart, eventually. But it's not the Mozart which sticks a knife in Nixon's heart.

People come and go. Fragments of Easy, still grey and sick-looking; fragments of the town, looking likewise. They carry bricks and chairs and wheel out a piano or two into the street like it means a damn thing. Like moving the wreckage will undo the done things. Like it might somehow resolve into a complete picture. Into a street which may be plotted on a map and once more make some kind of sense.

Nixon stares up into the sky. It is the least depressing place.

It's a cloudy day besides the smoke of the town and the sun is nowhere to be found. Nixon tries to look for it, but it hurts his eyes.

It seems to Nixon that there are words in this perfect sky of desolation. There are numbers there too. Rows of serial numbers and curled, complicated writing which is so unlike his own scrawl. They are words for the things withdrawn - marriage, house, kid, and the dog. For sanity and reason and the acknowledgement of humanity and the dulling blow of a glass of whiskey thrown down his throat, a little like a bullet glancing off a helmet.

A hand on his shoulder. The whisper of heavy boots on broken streets.

"Are you coming inside?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I am."

*

4\. New Jersey: Nixon Nitration Works: by the dawn's early light

Major Richard Winters, late of the United States Army Paratroops, wakes in the dawn light to a sight he is not accustomed to. At the window, in silhouette, with small edges of sunlight colouring the fringes of his hair dark red and his pale skin slightly pink, is his friend Lewis Nixon. He is staring out at the light over New Jersey. It is almost exactly a year since they came home.

"Nix?"

"Hmm?"

"Did you go to bed?"

"Yeah, I did ... actually."

"So you know what time it is?"

Nixon chuckles, a low, bubbling noise in his throat. "No, not really. Sunrise is at about five this time of year. So I guess it's around five."

"It's five twenty-seven, Nix," Dick says, squinting at his watch where it lies on the dresser. "And I don't think I've ever seen you awake at this hour."

"Voluntarily, at least."

"I suppose."

"I wanted ... to see the dawn. See the sky, you know? It's so beautiful. Or so you continue to tell me."

Dick smiles at him. He wonders what on earth is going on first of all, but he smiles because Lewis is smiling and Lew with a smile on his face is every bit as special as an exceptional example of natural beauty. Because it is, for Dick Winters, the same thing.

"Well, it is."

"Yeah, I know - I'm lookin' at it!"

Dick laughs. Nix laughs. The sky continues to brighten.

*

It is not a happy ending, not really. The happiness comes only in fits and starts, as it must, Dick supposes, with a drinker. Cathy divorced Lew as soon as they returned to the States and far from finding it a freedom, it only seemed to make Nix worse. His drinking, and his implacable sense of the pessimistic in everything, jarred against Dick's nerves, making him anxious in his first few months of civilian life as he never was during the worst parts of the war. He thinks that must happen to them all though, in their different ways. Though home is, or was, the thing they wanted most, it is as intangible as a Holy Grail. Dick isn't sure if it is the changes in themselves or the changes, slight as they are, in America which make the difference, but it sure isn't the same.

People use the word 'hero' around them, around Lewis, too much. And whenever they do, Dick shares his bed with a man who stinks of whiskey and unhappiness. He doesn't understand, but he does stay, with his arms around Lew.

They are lovers sometimes, other times they are only men who work together, at other times again, best friends. Dick thinks he prefers the third iteration and that Nix agrees, sometimes. They make difficult, intense sexual partners. They are so different and the difference shows itself more clearly now they are civilians and now that their work is just work and not a mission. It is hard to transfer a bond which depended so deeply on circumstances, even though that bond has slowed and matured and turned with the years into what they have now; hard to remember, some days, how it was then and hard on other days to forget.

On the first anniversary of D-Day which they spent on American soil, Lew downed a bottle and a half of Vat 69 and seemed the same darkly happy, wise-cracking soul he was at the start of their time together. It was only later that Dick found him sitting on the edge of their bed, with his head in his hands, overcome by the unhappiness he had been trying so hard to master.

It is the same most days, most months. The pattern stretches and contracts. He can go from one to the other in as little as three hours or as much as three months. So Dick doesn't think they can call themselves happy, not yet.

*

He's wearing his undershirt and shorts and his hair is unkempt - a black tangle on his head. Dick shakes his own head as he gets up and goes to stand beside Lew at the window. He rubs a hand through the mess and probably only succeeds in making it a little worse. Lew twists away, giving him a look which Dick interprets as something like: leave me be, you should know the deal by now. So Dick only smiles and opens the curtains a little wider.

He's quite right: it is beautiful. It's not Pennsylvania, but it's close. Though Dick doesn't know if he loves the landscape for what it is or what it contains. He smiles again, to himself.

"Do you like it here?"

Lew's voice is soft, almost fearful.

"Sure, I do. I wouldn't stay if I didn't."

Lew nods, absorbing this sentence slowly. ""Cause I wonder ... sometimes. That little farm, you know."

"Not yet, Nix."

"Right."

"I'm not ready to go yet."

He nods again. It's not nonchalance, though Lew probably thinks it looks like nonchalance. "Okay. I'm glad."

"Yeah."

Nix throws the curtains wide from the window. Dawn is over. There is honest-to-God sunlight, fresh air, dew. The sky is blue and cloudless. They sit on the side of the bed, bare thighs and calves touching, and watch.

*

It doesn't seem out of the ordinary to anyone in Nixon, NJ. They're old army buddies, best friends, veterans. Who cares whether they share the old, empty house with each other - haven't they earned the right to do as they please? No-one asks. It's beyond unthinkable; Dick thinks if they walked down Main Street hand in hand no-one would realise, no-one would really care. And perhaps that is an understatement (Nix thinks it is) but Dick feels perfectly safe. Contentment is a ways away, and there is a small voice in his head that tells him that contentment is not here at all, but living day-to-day has been his habit for four years now, give or take, and it is better than good enough.

Dick has a study in the attic of the house; Nix has a wine cellar stocked with what few morsels are left of the Berchtesgaden vintages. The Works keeps them busy. Dick doesn't think it suits Nix very well, but he admires, silently, his friend's resolve to keep at it, to work hard, to please his old man. For his part, Dick enjoys the bustle, the enterprise, and the silence in his office, sometimes. When it gets too much he walks around a little, gets to know the workers. They begin deferential and the traces of it never leave them, but soon he knows family histories and baseball allegiances and when Nix can't make it in because he cannot get out of bed, it is Dick who gets the solicitous queries: how is he? Is he okay?

Usually he is. And for the times when he is not, Dick assures the men that he will be soon. It'll just take a little time.

*

"You still believe in heroes, Dick?"

"I think my answer's still the same, yeah."

"Huh," Nix says, like a laugh. Just an exhalation of breath.

"Why are you asking?"

"I've been thinking about it. I can't make up my mind."

"I'm the same way. Sometimes."

"Yeah?"

"Sure."

"How'd you like that? I forget you're not all-knowing sometimes, Dick," Nix says, a grin parting his lips to show his white teeth and his eyes stretched, filled up with black.

Dick only smiles. "What's brought on this pondering?"

"Ah, I don't know. Just time, I think. Anniversaries. I found that old helmet, you know? The one I got shot in."

"You kept it?"

"Yeah. I did."

"You're one lucky S.O.B., Nix."

Nix turns to him, still grinning, probably at his refusal to give the acronym its true expression. "I know it."

"Can we go back to bed?"

"Okay," he says, raising his hands palms outwards, "This is just a little weird. I'm beginning to suspect divine interference here. _I'm_ up to see the dawn and _you're_ desperate to go back to bed? I've wandering in on somebody's bad dream."

"No," Dick says. "I didn't mean to sleep."

"Oh."

It's Dick's turn to grin. Lewis is under the mistaken impression, despite all the evidence he has to the contrary, that Dick's appetites, sexual and otherwise, are in some ways stunted, and that the fact that Lew initiates sexual encounters pretty much all the time is indicative of more than the simple truth that he just tends to get his requests in first.

"It's a beautiful morning," Dick says.

"It sure is."

"Worth marking in some way."

"I couldn't agree more."

"I'm glad."

*

Dick knows that this isn't a forever kind of deal. But as in war, time stretches and seems eternal. These are happy years and ones he knows he will remember as long as he lives. It's not the same as it was, but who would want it to be?

He's not sure anymore what he thinks about heroes, if he's scrupulously honest. But he doesn't think either that Nix wants that answer. He wants the dichotomy, the contrast. I am here and you are over there and though we meet in the middle on occasion, I like this line that someone drew between us; it helps me see it all better.

Nix does take him to Chicago, once. The city seems vast and almost foreign in its metropolitan glory and its civilised men difficult to comprehend fully, for Dick at least. Nix is an old pro at blending in with these guys, but when they return to the hotel and the door is closed, Nix pulls off his tie and throws it down on the bed and mutters _thank god that's over_ and pours himself a glass and dissects, not the gossip and the stories about people Dick has never heard of, but the play. Its beauties and its deficiencies and its message. They decide to pronounce it good. And Nix drinks to that with a smile on his face and they sleep huddled close though the night is not cold. It is their habit. It has proved a good one.

Different as they are, love meets them in the middle, with a hand stretched out over each side of the chasm. Dick Winters doesn't remember when he fell in love with dark, unhappy Lewis Nixon. It seems like forever.

*

Nix rests his head on Dick's shoulder. His eyes are still open, still watching the progress of clouds across the sky. His head, his body pressed against Dick's side, is heavy, ponderous. Dick lets his arm curl around him. He puts a hand up into his hair, which is a mess of Brylcreem and the effects of falling asleep in the big armchair downstairs. Dick smoothes it through and through his fingers and this time Nix lets him, with a soft sigh. When the weight gets too heavy and Nix's breathing too much like the slow rhythms of sleep, Dick pushes him back onto the bed.

"Hey," he says, "What're -- "

"You want to do this thing, or not?"

"Yes, sir."

"Nix."

"What? You're very commanding when you're like this." He grins, stretches out across the bed with his arms up behind his head. "It's kinda sexy. Never noticed it before."

"You're gonna pay some attention?"

"Is there a test afterward?"

"There might be, Captain."

Nix raises a hand to his forehead in a loose salute. His grin has sunshine in it, Dick thinks.

Lew's hands support his chest as he straddles the bed. It creaks horribly, and they both wince, expecting a collapse. It was built for two, but probably not for two grown paratroopers. Lew moves his hands to Dick's thighs, not stroking, only a warm weight at the line of his shorts and his skin.

"First manoeuvre successful."

"Are you going to quit that?"

"Just making notes."

"Shut up."

"Yes, sir."

His mouth is parted in a grin, teeth and tongue and the hint of a laugh bubbling up under the contact. Dick puts both hands up to Lew's face as he always does, always will. Strokes his cheek, the shadows of stubble above his lip, covering his jaw, the black smudges of his eyebrows. Lew closes his eyes, always has. Something in him finds this attention, this evidence of concern - of fascination really - which Dick has for him embarrassing, difficult. It flushes his pale skin pink and he tries to twist away again, pulling against Dick's hands or trying to hide his face in Dick's shoulder. Dick won't let him go. A kiss on his forehead, another to cover his left eye, a touch of Dick's tongue across his jaw on the right side, a dry press of Dick's mouth to the part of his throat where his pulse beats, another over the place where his dogtags were, the first time they did this.

Lew's face is closed, frowning. Almost wincing. Dick strokes his cheekbone with the backs of his fingers.

_Is it so hard?_

Then he closes his mouth over Lew's, kisses him. He doesn't try to make it perfect; it can never be that. Perfect, like tomorrow, never comes. And he won't make promises. He only tries to say what he means.

_You know I do._

Kisses turn heavier, become serious things, twisting around them as the light level rises and the sunlight breaks through the window. And they don't notice, either of them. The sun falls on Lew's chest as Dick bends his head there and in Dick's hair as Lew raises his fingers into it. But by that time, they are beyond the perfect dawn.

Dick rests his head on the plane of Lew's belly, having pushed his undershirt up his chest, under his armpits. He can't get over how warm Lew is; such pale, cold-looking skin, but such heat coming from it. He's lived with this body for four years, give or take, but it still has its secrets, its wonders. Dick is sure that shouldn't be possible, that he should know everything by now. He's glad he doesn't.

Lew's hands are resting in his hair. His erection is a hard point against Dick's collarbone. Dick sinks lower in the bed and rubs against it with his cheek. Lew groans.

"Oh, Dick. C'mon ... "

"Too slow for you, Captain?"

"I'm all over slow - I don't like torture much is all."

"Into every life, Lew."

"Yeah, yeah."

Dick smiles, to himself, as he bends to his work. He slips his fingers under the waistband of Lew's shorts, meeting smooth skin which he has to linger over, rubbing his thumb over its softness, before he pulls the shorts over Lew's hips. He throws the shorts over onto the floor and gives Lew's thigh a light slap when he tuts, in imitation of all the times Dick has done the same thing. He goes for one more kiss before he begins and Lew rolls his eyes but gives his mouth easily enough. He is grinning again when Dick pulls away.

His hand, his mouth. Heat, pressure, release. It's easy, or it should be. It is never as easy as Dick feels it ought to be. He loves to observe the results, the reactions. The way Lew's hips buck up into his hands, up against his arms. The dark lines which might be pleasure or pain that write themselves over his face. The small, vulnerable cries he makes, the like of which Dick has never heard in any other place than this bed and for which is is glad, scared, moved.

Dick takes him in his mouth. He is velvet-smooth, hotter than the sunlight which scorches Dick's eyes, and it doesn't take long. It never does.

Lew tastes bitter, something like crushed herbs at the back of his throat. Dick only realises his hands are shaking as he strokes them over Lew's hipbones, trying to still him, and trying to master himself. Pleasure looks so much like pain. In Lew it always has.

His hands try to be gentle, turning Lew over on the bed. He's a big guy, a heavy guy, full of satiation, and most of him doesn't want to move. But Dick's will is stronger. He can't help the kisses he runs up Lew's back. The tenderness floods out of him; an open heart. It even hurts, in a way which Dick doesn't really understand. He thinks that Lew would, that Lew would just smile - an upturn at the corner of his mouth. So maybe that's okay. He leaves kisses in Lew's hair, strokes his shoulders, runs his hands under his belly, pulls him up and shoves a pillow under his hips. It's a true Nix grin which greets him when Lew turns his head, as far as he can, and catches his eye.

"Just you be careful there, soldier."

"Shut up, Nix," Dick says, smiling, kissing the small of his back. "Just be quiet."

Nix chuckles, softly. He closes his eyes, letting his head rest back on the pillow. He could almost be a sleeping boy.

Dick gazes at him for a little, quietly. He looks out to the window, back to the bed. He smiles, begins again; a new day.


End file.
